Georgia special election 2017

Rank-and-file Democrats are, reasonably, disappointed with a loss in what seemed to be a winnable special election in Georgia. Even my colleague Andrew Prokop warns that Democrats shouldn’t “sugarcoat” the result, which is “bad news” for the party.

But step back from the specifics of the race and look at all four special elections in red districts held since Donald Trump’s election, and a more optimistic story emerges. Democrats have successfully transferred Hillary Clinton’s gains in well-educated districts to their down-ballot candidates, even while succeeding in making up some of the ground she lost in white working-class ones.

In the wake of Jon Ossoff’s defeat Tuesday night in the special election for Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, many were quick to blame the candidate’s flaws. Despite the immense boost from out-of-state donors, which helped make this the most expensive House race in history, Ossoff suffered from a bland image and a bland message — a symptom of the larger disarray within the Democratic Party.

“His campaign slogan proclaimed him ‘Humble. Kind. Ready to Fight’ — a positionless vessel of 2017’s cross-cutting political angst,” writes the Atlantic’s Molly Ball.

Here’s what we didn’t learn Tuesday night in Georgia’s special election: how people feel about Donald Trump.

We already knew the race, which pitted Democrat Jon Ossoff against Republican Karen Handel, would come down to a few thousand votes after an absurd amount of money was spent on the election. We also already knew it would only represent a very weird district that Trump won by just 1.5 points in the 2016 presidential election — but also reelected Republican Tom Price to Congress by 23 points.

Democrats faced yet another disappointment in Tuesday’s special elections, as Jon Ossoff, their candidate in the runoff for Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, fell short and Republican Karen Handel came out on top.

Meanwhile, in the much lower-profile race for another open House seat in South Carolina’s Fifth District, Democrat Archie Parnell came far closer to winning than expected in a heavily Republican territory. In the end, he lost to GOP nominee Ralph Norman.

With most precincts now reporting, it appears Republican Karen Handel has defeated Democrat Jon Ossoff to represent Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District in a hotly contested special election.

This was the most expensive House race in history (more than $50 million has been spent) and the most eagerly awaited special election this year. Ossoff, a 30-year-old former documentary filmmaker and congressional aide, came in first in Georgia’s “jungle primary” in April, winning 48 percent of the vote in a race against more than a dozen other candidates. But he ultimately did not capture 50 percent, which would have resulted in his direct election without a runoff.

Jon Ossoff’s narrow loss in the Georgia House special election seat will come as a crushing emotional blow to Democrats even though it hardly dooms their hopes to take back Congress next year.

To gain a majority, Democrats need to find a way to win races in districts like this one — traditional Republican bastions endangered by Donald Trump’s weakness with college graduates — but they don’t need to sweep them all by any means. Ossoff was the best recruit Democrats had available in the district, but a guy with no elective experience whose house lies just outside the district boundaries is hardly an ideal candidate.

SANDY SPRINGS, Georgia — Democrat Jon Ossoff ran a campaign with unprecedented support from national grassroots donors, faced an opponent with a controversial history at a popular charity, and managed to escape a turbulent six-month race relatively scandal-free.

It wasn’t enough.

Jon Ossoff looks at the ceiling and sighs. He appears tired after nearly six months of his unrelenting congressional campaign for a House seat in Georgia’s Sixth District. He’s less than six hours away from learning the results of a long-shot race turned tangible possibility.

And now the 30-year-old congressional candidate, carrying the hopes of Democrats nationwide and the attention of the president, is figuring out how to answer a question about voters I met at Waffle House, the Southern restaurant chain.

ROSWELL, Georgia — If Jon Ossoff wins, he’ll have the Republican efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare with a bill that could strip health insurance from tens of millions of people to thank.

Many of the volunteers here say they’re being motivated by powerful fears of what losing health insurance may unleash. In particular, more than a dozen of Ossoff’s foot-soldiers said that critical questions of reproductive rights and women’s health — fueled both by Republican Karen Handel’s controversial record of cutting off Planned Parenthood funding while running Planned Parenthood and congressional Republicans’ secret health care bill — have played essential roles in motivating them to support Ossoff.

ROSWELL, Georgia — Political strategist Brian Fallon argued that the Democratic Party’s path to power lay through “the Panera Bread Houses of America” — a reference to the affluent, suburban communities expected to swing Democratic.

Fallon, who worked on the Hillary Clinton campaign, sees opportunities in districts like the one that Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price vacated, districts that swung from Mitt Romney to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and in which Donald Trump’s dismal approval ratings might put Democrats over the top. He identified 23 such districts in an interview with Vox in an interview in April.

Abigail and John Pilger call themselves fiscal conservatives. They’ve voted for House Republican candidates for decades. Both have even donated money to previous campaigns of Karen Handel, the Republican candidate in Georgia’s upcoming special election.

But on Tuesday, the Pilger family plans to cross party lines to do something they once considered unthinkable — voting to elect a Democrat to Congress.

ALPHARETTA, Georgia — Karen Handel sits at the diner with a placid look on her face and delivers a scathing critique of her opponent, Democrat Jon Ossoff.

“He’s raised millions outside of Georgia from Nancy Pelosi and outsiders who just don’t share our priorities,” Handel tells the camera. “My opponent doesn’t live here [and] doesn’t share our values.”

ROSWELL, Georgia — Democrat Jon Ossoff has spent much of his campaign for the House fending off the charge that he is an “outsider” and “carpetbagger” who will undermine the traditional culture of Georgia. “He’s just not one of us,” says one of the ads by Republican Karen Handel, Georgia’s former secretary of state, ahead of Tuesday’s nationally watched special election.

Ossoff was born and raised in Georgia, but, in a way, Handel is onto something. Ossoff does represent something new and different in this white, conservative, largely suburban slice of the South.

MARIETTA, Georgia — Civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) stood in front of 50 Jon Ossoff volunteers at a campaign barbecue on Saturday and gave them a direct call to action.

”The vote is precious and sacred. It is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have,” he said. “There are some in this country who still seek to deny some of us our right to vote. We can fight back by exercising that right.”

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Republican senators say they’re getting frustrated with the chamber’s closed, secretive health care process.

Jon Ossoff’s campaign for the special election in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District is attracting national attention because it’s Democrats’ best short-term hope to deal a concrete political defeat to the GOP, and because Ossoff’s studied moderation is such a contrast with the populist fervor that is driving many grassroots progressive activists.

But when thinking about Ossoff’s campaign in this regard, it’s worth comparing his message not just to what national Democrats are doing but specifically to what Democrats have been trying in Georgia. If Ossoff wins, he’ll be the first white Democrat elected to federal office in the state since John Barrow, who was defeated back in the 2014 midterms.

With two weeks until the election, Republican candidate Karen Handel has given her Democratic opponent a gift-wrapped present in the special election for an open Georgia House seat.

At a debate on Tuesday, Handel said that she did not support a “livable wage” because she’s a conservative, not a liberal. Immediately, Democrat Jon Ossoff pounced on the admission, releasing an ad highlighting his support for the living wage.

The eyes of the political world are fixed on the Sixth District of Georgia, located in the upscale northern suburbs of Atlanta. Last week, Democrat Jon Ossoff stunned many observers by winning 48 percent in an all-party “jungle” primary; in June, he will face Republican Karen Handel in a runoff.

The Georgia Sixth has a long Republican history; Newt Gingrich represented it when he was speaker of the House, and GOP candidates usually win here by double-digit margins. (It is not the same district that elected Gingrich from 1978 through 1990 — the Sixth’s lines were altered radically by Georgia Democrats in an unsuccessful effort to push Gingrich out of Congress. But it’s safe to say that the territory that makes up the current Sixth has been safely Republican since the Nixon era.) It was vacated when Rep. Tom Price was confirmed as Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services.